The Civics of Higher Education

Christina Clark was working online — trying to up her “LinkedIn game” — when she spied a post promoting a new program to recenter the civic mission of higher education. Clark knew immediately she wanted to join the movement, led by New Jersey nonprofit The Institute for Citizens & Scholars [C&S]. It was the spring 2024 semester, and Clark recently had been named the eighth president of La Roche University, a Catholic institution in McCandless, that integrates the liberal arts with pre-professional study.

Last spring was marked by congressional hearings in which the leaders of high-profile national universities testified about allegations of antisemitism that roiled their campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the war that followed. No such unrest rustled La Roche, which Clark attributes not to student disengagement but to the “interesting mix” of political, socioeconomic and geographic diversity that characterizes the campus, where students from western Pennsylvania live and learn alongside an international population totaling about 20 percent and where the Catholic values of compassion and empathy offer an orienting north star.

As a scholar of classical oratory, Clark understood the way that politics can unite or divide. She was a dean at Marymount University, near Washington, D.C., during the 2016 presidential election and knew that many Muslim students felt unsafe in light of Donald Trump’s announced “Muslim ban.” A town hall was convened, but not every faculty member felt equipped to handle such difficult exchanges, especially when matters of political preferences and fundamental rights can collide. “This is something every college president should be doing,” Clark said, referring to the C&S College Presidents for Civic Preparedness program, which seeks to make campuses into laboratories for fostering the dialogue that a diverse democratic society demands.

The same initiative has attracted University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Joan Gabel and Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian, and the three Allegheny County college leaders have enlisted their institutions in the program that launched with 15 members in August 2023 and now includes more than 100 colleges and universities nationally. The story that emerges from these campuses reveals that the work of forming citizens lies not in viral video footage of police-curtailed protests or clickbait stories about ultra-sensitive students unwilling to engage with tough topics, but over shared dinners and in quiet classrooms.

“As a nation, we’ve forgotten how to develop citizens,” said C&S President Raj Vinnakota, who joined C&S in 2019. Formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the institute rebranded shortly after Vinnakota’s arrival and installed civic learning as a core part of its mission. Making citizenship education a priority requires a “multi-sector” approach, Vinnakota acknowledged, and the C&S portfolio contains pages on workforce development and youth programming. But its primary focus is on higher education, and for good reason.

The idea that a democracy is only as functional as its citizens are informed dates to the nation’s founding, when President George Washington asked that Congress consider establishing a “national University.” Washington’s school never materialized, but his vision has propelled higher education movements ever since, including the creation of land-grant universities in the mid-19th century and the World War II-era G.I. Bill.

Recently, however, that public-minded purpose has receded as private economic imperatives — sometimes tied to metrics that track graduates’ income by college major — have moved front and center.

“For almost 50 years, higher education has ceased to make the public case that educating for democracy has always been central to our mission,” said historian Carol Geary Schneider, past president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. The organization warned of the waning attention to democracy on U.S. campuses in a report first published in 1995 and reissued in 2011.

Higher education professionals emphasize that colleges have never truly abandoned pro-democracy efforts, such as voter registration drives, research for the common good, and student volunteer opportunities — although that work hasn’t always been tagged with the “democracy” label, and democratic principles haven’t always been key to the content. The result is that few people associate the goals of advancing informed citizenship or democratic engagement with higher education institutions, according to focus group research conducted by the Lumina Foundation, which advocates for post-high school learning opportunities.

Even as participants were reticent to attach democratic designs to the campus mission, they indicated that colleges can and should play a role in building strong communities and forging bridges across various divides, said Debra Humphreys, Lumina’s vice president for strategic engagement. And it’s in that perception where Vinnakota sees opportunity. He cites a 2023 C&S study showing that 37.4 percent of the roughly 4,000 18- to 24-year-old Americans surveyed welcomed conversations with those holding differing political views. Although that number may seem low, roughly the same percentage of Americans nationwide viewed such exchanges negatively.

“Along with classes and preparation for their profession, students also come to campus to learn about society and meet and learn from people with a variety of points of view,” said Gabel, who joined the C&S cohort weeks after starting as Pitt’s chancellor in July 2023.

The college campus may constitute students’ first encounter with a diversity of identities, ideas, and values. Those encounters “can be deeply uncomfortable,” acknowledged Jahanian in a September 2023 statement to the CMU community.

But according to Jahanian, who enlisted his campus in the program last spring, “such friction is not a harbinger of failure but rather a natural byproduct of authentic engagement, capable of leading to profound understanding and insight.”

To make a more tolerant atmosphere for the students and faculty requires what Vinnakota called “air cover and support” for college presidents. The characterization may surprise anyone who watched the spring 2024 congressional grilling of university chiefs. Aren’t college presidents all-powerful leaders positioned to shape their institutions as they so desire? Not exactly, according to Vinnakota, who pointed to higher education’s shared governance model, which incorporates the voices of trustees, funders, faculty and other stakeholders in decision-making.

“The power of the president is more through influence than outright authority,” Vinnakota said, adding that it is “an under-leveraged power” when it comes to the issue of democracy education on campus.

The Institute for Citizens & Scholars initiative helps presidents pull a lever that’s clearly been on their minds. According to a 2024 study sponsored by Academic Search, an executive search firm, 90 percent of the higher education leaders surveyed said supporting democratic processes and civic engagement is an important part of their overall responsibilities.

C&S charges no fees for presidents to join. For other components, such as a faculty institute that trains teachers to bring contentious issues into the classroom, C&S charges for admission but offers financial aid. This fee-for-service programming generates about one third of the budget for what is a multimillion-dollar initiative overall. An ideologically diverse group of philanthropic funders, including the Charles Koch Foundation and the Einhorn Collaborative, makes up the rest.

Calum Matheson, chair of Pitt’s department of communication, was one of the beneficiaries of the C&S faculty institute which he attended last summer. Matheson studies the way people communicate across a variety of media and applies C&S tools for encouraging various viewpoints both in his classroom and in his campus-wide work as a steering committee member for the Year of Discourse and Dialogue, a suite of programming that connects the Pitt community around the themes of civic discourse and free expression. It’s one of Gabel’s signature initiatives under the C&S umbrella, and a necessary one at a time of increasing polarization in the country, Matheson said.

Matheson also sees the need for another keyword: debate. “Increasingly, people think that debate is about shouting at the other side, on the one hand, or preaching to the choir, on the other.” He directed Pitt’s debate program for seven years and believes that debate can make dialogue across differences more possible, a principle he has deployed with great success. “We should have the courage to say that we disagree, and stick to our beliefs, but also the courage to be open to the possibility of persuasion and the willingness to change our minds.”

Down the road at CMU, Richard Scheines is pursuing a similar project. As dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, he is exploring ways to incorporate the teaching of civil discourse into the general education curriculum.
“If higher ed can’t teach civil discourse, who can?” asked Scheines.

C&S hopes to see good results in the three areas the program is currently measuring on campuses: an increased willingness to engage with opposing viewpoints; a decrease in polarization, or knee-jerk judgments about people based on their affiliations; and a growing culture that encourages everyone to speak up, even those holding a minority view.

Ultimately, change will come from the progress underway at the three local colleges and across the country. For Benjamin Cadamore, a La Roche senior studying criminal justice and criminology, with minors in political science and pre-law, the best education in democracy came in the form of a 2023 spring break service trip to Brownsville, Texas. He travelled to the southern border as part of a La Roche cohort of 10. About half were international students intimately familiar with the immigration process. The others hailed from western Pennsylvania, like Cadamore, who grew up in Butler.

“We had discussions and we disagreed on things, but we were all friends first,” he said.

“We weren’t so attached to our perspectives and our opinions that we weren’t able to disagree on things and then go to dinner.”
Gregory Laski holds a Ph.D from Northwestern University and writes about culture and civic life. His latest book is “Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today,“ (2023).